What makes great nonprofits great? In their book, Forces for Good: The Six Practices of High-Impact Nonprofits (Jossey-Bass, 2008), authors Leslie R. Crutchfield and Heather McLeod Grant studied 12 high-impact nonprofits to find out. What they discovered is that great nonprofits don’t necessarily have large budgets or perfect management. Instead, greatness has more to do with how nonprofits work outside the boundaries of their organizations than how they manage their own internal operations. The authors distilled six practices from their research that these 12 nonprofits use to achieve significant results, from working with the government and advocating for policy change to sharing leadership and empowering others to be forces for good. Any organization seeking to increase its social impact can emulate these practices. This book shows you how.

Several forces are driving the growth of the nonprofit sector. For one, an unprecedented amount of wealth is being given to nonprofits from corporate foundations, private philanthropists and individual donors. Second, federal cutbacks have forced nonprofits to provide services that were historically the domain of the state. And third, new technology has made people more aware of the world’s problems and, in the process, created a sense of urgency to solve them. These three forces and more have forced nonprofits to rethink the way they do business. In order to be true forces for good, they must learn new ways of thinking and acting. The 12 nonprofits highlighted in this book have achieved real impact, and other nonprofits can learn from them.

In a nutshell, organizations seeking greater impact must learn how to do the following:

• Work with government and advocate for policy change, in addition to providing services;
• Harness market forces and see business as a powerful partner, not as an enemy to be disdained or ignored;
• Create meaningful experiences for individual supporters and convert them into evangelists for the cause;
• Build and nurture nonprofit networks, treating other groups not as competitors for scarce resources but as allies themselves;
• Adapt to the changing environment and be as innovative and nimble as they are strategic; and
• Share leadership, empowering others to be forces for good.

Although the authors acknowledge that these six practices may seem simple or obvious, in reality they are difficult to implement. One of the reasons for this is because nonprofits can’t do these things alone. Other sectors of society have to meet them halfway. Business, government and concerned citizens must be open to working with nonprofits, and donors must change their definition of what it means to be great—for example, by funneling resources to those organizations that have the greatest impact versus those with the best overhead ratios.

What the authors conclude is that becoming a great nonprofit is not about building a great organization and then expanding it to reach more people; instead, achieving greatness is about mobilizing every sector of society—government, business, nonprofits and the public—to be a force for good. The 12 high-impact nonprofits highlighted in this book are satisfied with building a “good enough” organization and then spending their time and energy focused externally on creating large-scale, systemic change. Great organizations work with and through others to create more impact than they could achieve on their own. They use the power of leverage to create change; they influence and transform others in order to do more with less.

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